How Elliot Rodger Twisted Music Into Murder

Themes of grand, life-defining love show up in the songs the killer used to soundtrack his haunting videos.

Not long after a sudden downpour subsided at the Boston Calling Music Festival on Saturday night, Death Cab for Cutie took the stage and launched into four plus minutes of a carefully architected instrumental. Like U2 at their most expansive, the band seemed on the verge of some statement of grand purpose. And then Ben Gibbard let loose with one of their more popular songs. "How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me," he sang, thousands of fans joining along. "You reject my advances and desperate pleas. I won't let you let me down so easily....I will possess your heart."

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Having been staring at my phone for the majority of the concert, waiting for updates on the story of the killing spree in Santa Barbara, and learning details about the alleged motives of Elliot Rodger, who blamed his troubles on women who would not give him the affection he felt entitled to, it was hard to share the crowd's enthusiasm as I might have otherwise. I have no idea if the band was aware of the news unfolding that day before their performance, but it seemed an extremely tone deaf selection given the circumstances.

The problem is, the idea of unrequited love isn't just a recurring motif for Gibbard and company, one of the more popular, supposedly introspective and thoughtful indie rock bands of the era. It's practically the entire basis of popular music as we know it. This song in particular is extreme in its description of a spurned lover standing outside the window of the object of his affection, but it's a piece of a vast spectrum of the glorification of obsessive heartbreak that informs the way we think about love, and is certainly a part of the world in which Rodger's twisted outlook was formed. The night before, the ostensibly inoffensive Jack Johnson had spun his own tales of pining and the women who treat him poorly.

These are our musical heroes, our emotional role models.

I was thinking about this over the course of the night and into the next morning as I anticipated the next day of the concert when Brand New, long one of my favorite bands, would be performing. The Long Island band, regularly grouped into so-called emo punk sub genre, first broke through with their track "Jude Law and a Semester Abroad" in 2001. "And even if her plane crashes tonight she'll find some way to disappoint me," the lyric goes. "By not burning in the wreckage, or drowning at the bottom of the sea."

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The band avoided that one on Sunday, to the disappointment of an adoring crowd, but they did include a riveting, raw take of a later song "Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't." "I am Heaven sent, don't you dare forget. I am all you've ever wanted, what all the other boys all promised."

It sounded like something Rodger might've included in his 140 page manifesto. You might as well have called it the Friend Zone National Anthem. But these types of songs aren't outliers, they're the rule.

My conflicting excitement over the concert and this sickening feeling over the murders reminded me of a formative piece written by music critic Jessica Hopper called "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" some ten years ago. In it she focused on the then rising-tide of emo punk bands that were bubbling up from the underground to dominate the mainstream alternative culture, but the overarching concept is applicable to popular music in general. "Girls in emo songs today do not have names. We are not identified," she wrote. "Our lives, our struggles, our day-to-day-to-day does not exist, we do not get colored in. We span from coquettish to damned and back again. We leave bruises on boy-hearts, but make no other mark. Our existences, our actions are portrayed solely through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglements of the boy singer; our region of personal power, simply, is our breadth of impact on his romantic life."

How does one contend with this as a music fan, she wondered, without dismissing all of rock and roll entirely? The history of rock has the objectification of women in its very DNA, stretching back to Chuck Berry through the Beatles and the Stones, Zeppelin, and almost everything that's come since. Women are either at fault for their absence, or cursed harpies delighting in the pain of the men they've scorned. Sort of takes the fun out of a concert when you start thinking about it in those terms.

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By now Elliot Rodger's frustrations with women, perversely curdled into hatred, have been well-documented in both the unsettling videos he posted to YouTube, and in his 140 page manifesto now posted online. His references to music throughout show how deeply this idea of the mythological romantic longing for something just out of his reach colored in his world view.

"The song 'Two Is Better Then One' always played on the radio when I went on those night drives," he writes at one point of the collaboration between the band Boys Like Girls and Taylor Swift. "It made me feel sad, though it was soothing at the same time. That song will always remind me of the loneliness I felt during those experiences."

"So maybe it's true that I can't live without you," the lyric for that one goes. Sound familiar? It's hard to find a love song where a similar sentiment isn't expressed. Themes of grand, life-defining love show up in the songs Rodger used to soundtrack his haunting videos, from The Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," to Steve Perry's "Oh Sherrie," Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know?" and Naked Eyes' "Promises Promises."

Women are liars and bitches in Rodger's worldview, a concept we all rightfully find revolting. So then why do so many of our favorite songs tell the same story? "I will destroy all women because I can never have them," he wrote. "I will make them suffer for rejecting me."

If you set that to a some minor chords and fly in a string section, would you have a hit on your hands?

There's been a lot of discussion online about how our climate of male sexual entitlement contributes to a world in which men like Rodger feel entitled to women's sexuality, and while that's certainly true, it's only a part of the bigger picture. From the first moment children are exposed to popular culture, be it film, television, books, or most frequently music, they're fed a narrative about the power of all-consuming love that warps their perception of what a healthy romantic life should be. We lionize those among us capable of harnessing that misguided sense of alienation and isolation – what is a rock star but someone who feels things more than the rest of us and feeds it back in a digestible format? As someone who counts himself as a huge fan of just this sort of melodramatic music – Morrissey is my favorite singer for god's sake – I'm not sure how to square my enjoyment of the music with the notion that it's harmful to the way young people are taught to think about love.

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No one is to blame for these killings but Rodger. But when the entire basis of our collective cultural entertainment industry reinforces the idea that love is worth dying for, or committing desperate acts over, and the absence of love is akin to living in hell, it's hard not to understand why young people might feel unmoored and disconnected from the rest of us who all seem to be in on a secret world that has yet to reveal itself to them. For a reminder they need look no further than the thousands of us standing together in a crowd singing as much in unison at the top of our lungs.